Jennifer Grotz

Eyes wide like an owl’s, an aspirin-pale face foretells in lamplight how it accumulates age. Somewhat masked, somewhat naked, there’s no way to know what others see when looking at it. All five of the body’s senses crowd on this small planet a weather of hair surrounds. My face is not a democracy—the eyes are tyrants and the ears are radical dissenters. In the conversations of eyebrows, mine are whispers. Like the window at night, the face reflects too, uncertain how to change when greeting itself (and is it not cruel when another’s face won’t reflect acknowledgment of you?). My mother, my father, and my brother are found in the blurring of feature and expression. Cynicism finds no purchase here; the same cannot be said for sadness (and look deeper—anger hides in the jaw). And while the nose quietly broods like an actor rehearsing his soliloquy, the empty page of the forehead, when I raise my brows, fills suddenly with questions.

No one saw the first ones swim ashore centuries ago, nudged by waves into the marsh grasses. When you look into their faces, there is no trace of the ship seized with terror, the crashing waves and the horses’ cries when thrown overboard. Every afternoon you ride your bicycle to the pasture to watch the twitch of their manes and ivory tails unroll a carpet of silence, to see ponies lost in dream. But it isn’t dream, that place your mind drifts to, that museum of memory inventoried in opposition to the present. You felt it once on a plane, taking off from a city you didn’t want to leave, the stranded moment when the plane lifts into the clouds. That’s not dream, it’s not even sleeping. It is the nature of sleeping to be unaware. This was some kind of waiting for the world to come back.

Before the moths have even appeared to orbit around them, the streetlamps come on, a long row of them glowing uselessly along the ring of garden that circles the city center, where your steps count down the dulling of daylight. At your feet, a bee crawls in small circles like a toy unwinding. Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream. And the noisy day goes so quiet you can hear the bedraggled man who visits each trash receptacle mutter in disbelief:Everything in the world is being thrown away! Summer lingers, but it’s about ending. It’s about how things redden and ripen and burst and come down. It’s when city workers cut down trees, demolishing one limb at a time, spilling the crumbs of twigs and leaves all over the tablecloth of street. Sunglasses! the man softly exclaims while beside him blooms a large gray rose of pigeons huddled around a dropped piece of bread.